Roxie Laybourne is probably a name that you do not know. Thanks to the wonderful and deeply researched biography The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney, I hope that many more people will meet this remarkable 20th century pioneer of science. This book was published in 2025, and it is the newest book I have written about since launching this blog. Roxie, as everyone called her, almost singlehandedly invented the fi

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises , his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece. The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a l

Ever since I read The Hebrew Teacher , the first book translated into English by the US-based, Israeli-born writer Maya Arad, I have been eagerly anticipating the publication of her next book in English. The Hebrew Teacher is a collection of three novellas, all centered around Israeli transplants in America and the complicated bonds they have with one another and their homeland. The title story takes place at a college in the Midwest, and the other two are set in Northern C